College & Research Libraries News (C&RL News) is the official newsmagazine and publication of record of the Association of College & Research Libraries, providing articles on the latest trends and practices affecting academic and research libraries.

Established in 1966, College & Research Libraries News (C&RL News) provides articles on the latest trends and practices affecting academic and research libraries and serves as the official newsmagazine and publication of record of ACRL.

If you’d walked by Professor Susan Detwiler’s Writing and Critical Inquiry (WCI) classrooms at the University at Albany-SUNY on September 7, you would have seen something rather unusual: two teams of students huddled around tables ...

Using the Framework to facilitate student learning outcome development

A shift in thinking in the library profession has moved us from the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education to the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This shift from basic...

Post-truth rhetoric, relativism, and teaching on “Authority as Constructed and Contextual”

Within the current climate of political polarization and discussions about “post-truth” rhetoric, many academic librarians are debating how the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education1 does or does not address “post-truth” thinking and rhetoric. Most of these discussions have centered on the Authority Is Constructed frame, which describes source authority as determined largely in communities and within specific contexts, rather than as anything absolute or universal. The concept of constructed authority can potentially be understood as an affirmation that authority is purely a matter of opinion or subjective evaluation, or that there are no consistent ...

This article highlights the breadth of freely available digital collections of presidential documents. These repositories are excellent resources for presidential, political science, history, and foreign relations research. From the resources listed in this article, librarians can choose multiple starting points for student and faculty ...

Accelerating the transition to open access with introspection and repurposing funds

In 2017, four University of California (UC) campuses took a public stance on accelerating the transition to open access (OA) by endorsing the Open Access 2020 (OA2020) initiative’s Expression of Interest (EOI). OA2020 is an international effort to convert the existing corpus of scholarly journals from subscription-based access to OA. In March 2017, when the first three UC campuses—UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis, and UC-San Francisco—endorsed,1,2 there had been only one U.S. signatory institution (California State University-Northridge, having endorsed in July 2016). Six months later in September 2017, another UC campus, Merced, added its affirmation. As of this writing, these five ...